


I'll even let you hold the remote control

by possibilityleft



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-12 23:02:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2127735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/pseuds/possibilityleft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abed, Rachel, and a movie.  Quite a few movies, actually.  <em>Rachel and Abed have a lot of first dates, probably at least two a month.  They are meticulously plotted and often involve costumes and elaborate backstories, aliases and a surprising number of times falling into a fountain.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll even let you hold the remote control

**Author's Note:**

  * For [serenyty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/serenyty/gifts).



Rachel and Abed have a lot of first dates, probably at least two a month. They are meticulously plotted and often involve costumes and elaborate backstories, aliases and a surprising number of times falling into a fountain.

Rachel is pretty sure that Abed feels the same way she does about it. In every life, in every self, she takes his hand. Abed has plenty of stories from his college days but he's silent about most of his earlier life. Rachel knows what that means.

Rachel has always has friends. She got an Internet connection at the age of ten and she's never looked back. She's made up all kinds of elaborate excuses for her mother to explain the letters she gets from across the world and the occasional strange houseguests. She doesn't have to do that anymore, now that she's at school. But it's been harder than she thought to make friends in college. She hasn't found the people who pepper their speech with TV Tropes shorthand or spend as much time on their Yuletide assignments as they do wrapping presents. 

Of course, Abed hasn't found those people either. He's found a ragtag band of misfits that Rachel almost can't believe are real. It isn't that they're "normal" -- no one at Greendale is actually normal -- but that they managed to find each other and stick together. They hooked up and broke up, opened businesses and played Dungeons and Dragons twice without killing each other. Rachel would like to fit in with them too, but she isn't pushing it. Abed is working on the crossover. He thinks they might manage it during sweeps, he tells her, to make her laugh. She's betting on the movie.

Abed knocks on her door with an infrared camera under his arm and they film a ghost story. She likes to think she does a good job of being possessed.

Rachel shows up at Abed's door with a pair of friendship bracelets and they can't find a single pair of jeans that would fit both of them at the thrift store. They do find a wealth of ugly vases and take them to Greendale's Antiques Roadshow, to walk away with the princely sum of five dollars. They split an ice cream with the proceeds.

They fight sometimes, but they have a mutual agreement not to do the airport dash scene. They don't ever want to get to that point. There's always Skype, after all. The pre-Internet age was great for drama, but not for communication so much.

Rachel joins the gardening club and hates it. Turns out that killing the Christmas cactus when she was eight was actually a warning. She joins the knitting club instead with Shirley's invitation, and finds out that it's actually a lot of fun. They don't become a second family, but Rachel does finish a bobbled hat and beta MJ's Ghost Soup fanfic before school lets out for the semester, so that's something.

Troy comes home from sailing around the world and gives Rachel a talking-to about taking good care of his best friend, but Rachel is pretty sure he ripped it directly from one sitcom or another. They have New Year's at the Hawthorne mansion and Rachel gets to meet Levar Burton, who is pretty cool.

On the first day of her last semester at Greendale, she meets up with Abed after class. They watch The last Unicorn, which they've both seen a dozen times, and Rachel falls asleep on Abed's couch, head on his shoulder. When she wakes up her mouth tastes gross and her hair is sticking up on that side, but she's never been so happy in a perfect, quiet way. Abed is snoring and her foot is asleep. She doesn't care.

"Unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story," Prince Lir says, and Rachel goes back to sleep.


End file.
